SCOOTER - A BETTER WAY TO ORGANISE CONTACTS, RELATIONSHIPS AND LIFE

Essential features that must be immediately available and easy to use

Anyone who uses a CRM system has 3 simple requirements that must be met immediately if the user is to even consider
investing the time and effort needed to learn the system:

1. Overview: When the application opens, the user needs to see a calendar, a list of current tasks and a list of the recent activities. For example, if I have a 3pm in London on Thursday and I've just made a call to Joe Bloggs at Acme Inc, my main navigation form should show a calendar with Thursday marked as having an activity and there should be a list of recently viewed items and actions with Joe Bloggs at Acme Inc in it.

2. Impex: People like to be able to easily import and export data. If a user fears that hours of manual data entry is needed, evaluation stops at that point. Likewise, if a user fears being unable to get their data back out in usable form, they will simply stop looking at the product.

3. Interoperability: People like the system to seamlessly integrate with their existing system. For example, if I enter Joe Bloggs email address as being joe_bloggs@acme_inc.com, the system should automatically scan your email clients for messages to an from that address and append them to Joe Blogg's history in the contact management system. Likewise the ability to use MS Word as the default text editor and MS Excel as the graphing tool while making sure the data remains with the CRM system makes users of those appliactions (that's somewhere around 93% of all PC users) more likely to invest a little time in learning to use the system.

Essential features that user will need to explore

1. Templates: No two customers are the same but huge numbers of businesses work in almost identical manners. So an industry template is important. Often this means calling functionality by names that the user knows. For example in a real estate template all customers are called vendors and all cases are called houses.

2. Scalability: Users like to make their data future proof. So if a user sets the system to manage his data and then hires someone to work for him, making it a multi-user setup should be as easy as adding another user profile. The system needs to be demonstrably scalable.

3. Data Protection: Users always hate losing data, especially when its because of over-enthusiatic application of the Delete key! A CRM must provide automated back-up and also must enable rollback of at least the last 20 edits in each client.